Athletes from CrossFit Calgary and CrossFit Central did extremely well at the 2009 CrossFit Games. In Part 2 of this two-part series, Mike Warkentin talks to Jeremy Thiel and Mike Gregory about their training secrets.

Jeremy Thiel is standing in the athletes’ warm-up area, yelling at a flat-screen TV streaming the live feed from the JumboTron towering over the Stadium. The energized Texan is barking instructions and encouragement as Crystal McReynolds and Carey Kepler work their way through a WOD. He looks almost as fired up as when he pulled 505 in the deadlift ladder a few hours earlier.

Thiel is passionate about CrossFit, but he’s also passionate about CrossFit Central, his athletes, his friends, his co-workers and his family—and Kepler and McReynolds represent all those things at once.

McReynolds, a coach at Thiel’s box, finished ninth, and Kepler, his sister and the co-founder CrossFit Central, finished third. Lance Cantu, another Central coach, placed 34th. CrossFit Central’s Affiliate Cup team placed second. One year after finishing third at the 2008 competition, Thiel himself made the Top 16.

Thiel believes the success of his box in Austin, Texas, comes from within.

“We have a mission here to push the human potential, and each coach and each person, each athlete, is constantly supporting and elevating. ... What we see is CrossFit as a community, and CrossFit Central has taken it to the next level.”

Download

This article is only available to subscribers. Please login or subscribe to download.

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.